From: "David A. Black" <dblack@...>
Date: 2004-09-19T08:30:23+09:00
Subject: Re: Method improvement request .--

Hi --

On Sun, 19 Sep 2004, Charles Hixson wrote:

> That's a very interesting rewrite of the parse1 match patterns.
> It's a bit more complicated than that, e.g., at the match boundary 
> apostrophe's aren't a part of the middle, but in the middle (of the 
> middle) they are.  Think about 'don't'. 

Think about "'tis" :-)

> P.S.:  Does scan keep recycling it's pattern, or would I need to replace 
> it with (an elaboration of)
> chunks   =   line.scan(/^((\W*)(\w*)(/W*)s+/)$).flatten

scan keeps recycling its pattern, but note that ^ and $ will be
included each time.  Note also that ^ and $ apply to lines, not the
entire string.  Thus:

  $ ruby -e 'p "a\nb\ncde\n".scan(/./)'
  ["a", "b", "c", "d", "e"]
  $ ruby -e 'p "a\nb\ncde\n".scan(/^.$/)'
  ["a", "b"]

You can use \A and \Z to indicate start and end of string (or \z to
match end-except-for-possible-newline).  


David

-- 
David A. Black
dblack@wobblini.net